By extending the chronological parameters of existing scholarship, and by focusing on legal experts' overriding and enduring concern with 'dangerous' forms of common crime, this study offers a major reinterpretation of criminal-law reform and legal culture in Italy from the Liberal (1861-1922) to the Fascist era (1922-43). Garfinkel argues that scholars have long overstated the influence of positivist criminology on Italian legal culture and that the kingdom's penal-reform movement was driven not by the radical criminological theories of Cesare Lombroso, but instead by a growing body of statistics and legal researches that related rising rates of crime to the instability of the Italian state. Drawing on a vast array of archival, legal and official sources, the author explains the sustained and wide-ranging interest in penal-law reform that defined this era in Italian legal history while analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of that reform and its relationship to contemporary penal-reform movements abroad.
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Table Of Contents:
1. Body count; 2. Civilized violence; 3. Force of habit; 4. Tomorrow's criminals; 5. Grapes and wrath; 6. Coup, casualty and catalyst: the Ferri Code, 1919-25; 7. Fascism's legal Risorgimento, 1925-31; Conclusion.